St. Patrick has lost, and the snakes have won

There never were any snakes in Ireland. For whatever reason, the Isle of Saints and Poets was never home to those fascinating and misunderstood creatures of God. The legend of St. Patrick- the missionary who brought Christianity to Ireland- driving the snakes out of Ireland is generally understood to be a metaphor for Christianity banishing the pagan values and mores of its past and their replacement with those of Christ.

Alas, the snakes are back, and their invasion seems to have been successful. 68% of the Irish electorate appears to have voted to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution, paving the way for the legalization of abortion.

The leading snake, of course, is the one that tempted Adam and Eve in the garden.

The wave of neo-paganism and pagan values which has been spreading across the Western world like a tsunami of darkness for decades has long since reached Ireland, too. I doubt that anyone is surprised by this outcome. The neo-pagans themselves like to pretend that Christianity is still somehow in the ascendant and that Christians are still the majority in the Western world because an ever-shrinking majority claim a nominal and largely imaginary adherence to the Faith. And the Faith itself is under attack even from within the Church through the ongoing drift of liberal Catholicism and mainline Protestantism from the substance of what has been believed, taught, and confessed "always, everywhere, and by all" regarding the sanctity of human life, issues of human sexuality- and, to put it bluntly, standards of common decency.

No, this result is no surprise. But as a Lutheran looking in from the outside, something continues to puzzle me about the reaction of the Roman Catholic magisterium to the embrace of pagan ethics by their flock. Why have all those pro-choice Catholic politicians in the United States not been excommunicated? Why, even now, is the Catholic church not confessing the Faith and drawing the honest and realistic conclusions from and recognizing the actual consequences of the Irish apostasy?

Have we Christians really so completely lost our nerve and our sense of purpose that we are afraid to alienate people by nothing more or less than insisting on the content of the Faith and pointing out that sharing in the Eucharist is inconsistent with repudiating basic Christian values?

As the cult of convenience, the deification of the individual, and the firm conviction that other human beings are expendable rides a flood of bad science and worse logic. We hear claims that an embryo is "nothing but a collection of cells" comparable to a fingernail. We hear an undeniably human and undeniably living creature already expressing its genetic potential as surely as you and I are, and simply being at an earlier stage of the process, dismissed as merely a potential life. We hear  those who surely know better repeat the scientifically inaccurate myth that the embryo or fetus- a genetically distinct individual- is somehow a part of the mothers body and that "the right of a woman to control her own body" is the issue here, rather than the destruction of somebody else's body whose presence within the mother's and whose very existence is nearly always a result of a conscious and deliberate choice on the mother's part. The shallow poverty of utilitarian self-centeredness continues to drown out the plain and simple truth, and the conscience of Western society continues to be seared by the set of transparent and badly-reasoned lies which form the basis of the "pro-choice" argument. And as a result, we are all plunged ever deeper into the darkness despite the moral and logical incoherence of the pro-choice argument. When is the Church, regardless of denomination, going to find the courage and the faithfulness to call the thing what it is, and treat it accordingly?

I certainly do not claim that the Church has the right to dictate public policy. But is it really so unreasonable for the Church to insist that its own members believe and support the faith it confesses, or have the honesty to admit that they themselves no longer confess it?

When are we going to stop pretending that there are no practical consequences to tolerating the notion that it's any more OK to burn incense to the emperor in our day than it was in the First Century?

One thing is certain: if the Church back then had been as gentle and "tolerant" in the face of the embrace by its members of pagan abominations as it is today, today there wouldn't be a Church at all.